it is all voice--musing, conversing, rambling, running on. The important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant, wisdom as a kind of shy, valiant loquacity. -Susan Sontag (whose novels, Crash Davis believes, are self-indulgent, overrated crap) on Robert Walser.

Monday, September 07, 2009

So today is a day off...for everybody but those of us fortunate enough to be poets at the University of Iowa. Though Labor Day, Monday is also workshop day and thus, far too important to skip, even on the event of a federal holiday. This fact upset my father-in-law yesterday, and he kept coming back to it while we spent a Sunday at his house. "So wait, you're really going to school tomorrow?" And then when I'd nod "yes," he'd look away in disgust. This disgust, though, was focused on many things and not just the fact that I had to go to school; it was also the nail in the coffin for school being a waste of time, it was the fact that we drove all the way up there just for the afternoon, it was that, in no possible-to-imagine way, was poetry more important than a day the man was willing to give you off from work.

A few additional things that happened yesterday:

I realized that reading Oppen in bed is a horrible place to read Oppen.

I got two phone calls from McNally after 2am. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and believing that he had no idea I would be in bed then...I'm usually not, but as I mentioned, today's a work day.

A friend of my dad's told me how he was going to kick his son's ass, "but maybe I won't...he thinks I will though, so that gives me the advantage, right?"

There was a totally wicked harvest moon in the early evening. Pictures of which turned out looking like nothing more than an orange dot and not at all like this other picture of a harvest moon, which would be okay, this picture looks pretty professional, but c'mon camera, you gotta do better than that if you want to stick around here.